musings above all

[pocketminstrel]

choy commons form

To put it concisely, I'm a huge fan of your work because I'm a huge proponent of community-led food systems that are humanizing, healthy, accessible, racially equitable, and environmentally sound! I'm super passionate about where I can support repairing harm (on people, the planet) caused by corporate farming/distributing and help put more power in the hands of local production. I have been involved with the Greene Hill Food Co-op for a few years, and have taking up foraging in recent years (mostly fungi) to build my ecological consciousness. So much of my Korean heritage has deepened my passion for food and food systems, with its mesmerizing level of various grains, plants, and herbs, and their preparation and preservation! I think of farming and foraging as the source of so much wisdom, culturally and otherwise, in regards to stewarding, exchanging with, and caring for land... as inhabitants of it! __

I grew up in a predominantly white and hispanic neighborhood, and come from Korean immigrants. I don't remember much of a time where I wasn't conscious of my race, and I think of my childhood as a very angry one largely as a result of it. This consciousness led me to explore race, class, and gender as a young adult - much of my lasting education has come from reading Audre Lorde, Baldwin, Du Bois, and Angela Davis. Today, I continue to grow my knowledge of via the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research and my involvement via Bed-stuy Strong. In recent years, I've been examining the ways in which racial equity intersects with my industry - tech - and have created resources for students and coworkers on the subject of both white supremacy culture and race + technology - can, and should, technology be "neutral" & how might we bend technology toward ensuring freedom and justice? I have also been a leader in Squarespace's AAPI resource group, organizing book clubs and community events. More recently, as myself and a loved ones suffer from chronic health conditions, I've become interested in disability justice and have been thinking a lot about community care and interdependence (which extends to all social justice really.)

[pocketminstrel]

i had one of my favorite weekends ever. i feel so happy. present. open and free. writing this while listening to “yellow is the color of her eyes” feels so fitting. i want to cling to every last bit of this feeling…. i feel like i love myself a little bit more after this weekend. i love my life a little bit more.

this is the happiest i’ve been in a while, and i’m trying to savor every bit of it. i feel nourished, supported, and i feel like i’m growing, learning, HEALING, being vulnerable, being open to the worlds gifts, being inspired by friends and TV shows (euphoria, INSECURE!) and scenes in new york.

earlier this week, i had felt the most out of control and beaten up perhaps that id ever felt in a long time. longer than i can remember in feeling. i managed to rebuild some strength towards the end of the week. my friends and family really pulled me out of some rash and panicked thoughts. ashley has been really loving and supportive this entire week when i’ve been at my lowest. elaine and umma too. their check-ins mean the world to me. being in the presence of friends makes me realize how much love is in my life, and how it feels just as good as romantic love. to be honest, platonic love is harder.

what i liked about it was - firstly - the lack of anxiety. i feel like in the last couple of years my anxiety & social anxiety really vanished away for the most part…. in this sense, aging is so great. im protective of my time, energy, and can be fully myself with people who see who i am and love who i am.

recounting everything i did:

friday, i got started applying to another job after a couple days of hard work putting my portfolio together earlier in the week.

i hadn’t slept too well so i hopped into bed for an hour and a half before dinner time to recharge just enough to make plans. i got some extremely yummy pho and salad at Di An Di (last minute plans with jon) and he gave me some really thoughtful advice / input on love and the andrew situation… plus general life stuff. it was really fun getting to know him a little bit more at dinner but especially at the wine bar. i liked that he was so curious about who i was. it felt good to feel special i guess, get asked so many questions. this gesture meant a lot. we talked about our siblings, how we grew up, our insecurities… it was really nice. i am so appreciative of his curious, reflective, and open nature. it reminds me a lot of myself. i think we make each other feel very seen.

after dinner we hopped to a wine bar and angela joined. it was great to see her after so long, and by that point in time i was pretty buzzed and ready to talk about anything and everything with even more excitement and presence than usual.

saturday morning, i hopped outta bed to see kara. we met up at and talked about how fucking hard it is to find the one. i am so grateful that she’s in my life. at brunch at king sikh tong, we caught up about our chaotic love lives. i realized that she’s been through a lot lately with love as well, also asking herself some of the same questions i have over the last few months. what do i need? what do i think i deserve? what do i accept or compromise on? afterwards, i hung out at her badass place in tribeca and said hello to her plants.

after brunch i trained to downtown brooklyn to pick up a bouquet of flowers for andrew. i helped the guy at the store arrange the flowers. it wasn’t the most beautiful assembly ever, but i liked that it had a piece of me in it for sure. i also didn’t want to hurt his feelings. it looked better in the wrapping paper than outside of it.

i then walked him, dropped of the flowers, then jogged to petit paulette to catch up with julia, who i haven’t seen in more than a week. i haven’t texted her much this week either. it was nice to catch up and feel her pure soul after a while. the way the sun came in from the windows at sunset was so warm and beautiful. we got a delicious cheese plate and zai joined us a little later on. we had a great time. i ended up running back to my place and zai met me there. she got ready for her date while i showered and got ready for my show. i ubered there and watched part of the show in a kinda male dominated side of the room, with a strange dude in front of my and some tall dudes surrounding me. when they for in the way of my view, these two butch black women came to my rescue, telling me that i didn’t deserve that. they made me feel very safe. though i ended up leaving eventually to the back of the room, then eventually, to the left back side of the room. something about that felt so safe immediately. i could feel that everyone was there for the show. they weren’t there to flex, be creepy, they loved vegyn as much as i did. many of them were alone as well. i learned a lot in that moment. about the kind of safety you can feel from body language and collective energy. the show was great and vegyn was so cute and quirky and hot. he started with some house/soul, before moving to some hip hop, then ending with his popular tunes. like It’s Nice to be Alive. it was really nice to be in the company of people like me, who share the same tastes. there were so many of us! it felt so nice bc i share my love for this artist w very few people.

i took the bus back home (L closures) and it came exactly on time. fell asleep pretty promptly because of how long and active my day was.

this morning (sunday), i spilled boricha all inside my lemaire bag but i’d like to think it’s fate that i needed to go back to my apartment because otherwise i would’ve been too far to potentially salvage my electronics.

i dropped off fan fan donuts to andrew’s place,y heart racing while doing so because i didn’t want him to notice me there. i ended up ringing his door bell then running away immediately! i then citi biked to brunch where julia ashley maddie and i had a fantastic afternoon. literally so much fun. julia got a free drink from the waiter who was a cutie but we were so stunned and unsure if it was a mistake or not that we probably made him feel a bit embarrassed. i especially was being pretty obnoxious i feel. but mostly because we were joking about how funny it would’ve been if she’d finished the drink before asking “was this for me?” hahaha i just cracked up thinking about it. she wrote her number down to the waiter and they had a short convo before we headed out. we ate some of the donuts i picked up at Littleneck outpost and the waiter there was such a cutie. loved his lil outfit. julia left him a little note to enjoy sardines together sometime. i was so in awe and inspired by her ballsy behavior.

but while we were there we ate some penis candy julia brought for us and continued to joke and enjoy some more. i took some gorgeous pictures of maddie and me and ash got some pics as well. i ended up getting a thank you text from andrew while i was there too. it made me happy that he wasnt being cold. it touched me actually.

after peeing at acre, me and maddie checked out a few vintage stores in the area and i actually ran into a lead from work. i think i made a good impression. we split and i made some spicy rigatoni when i got home which was so yummy! and some salad too, using the rest of my romaine. i started the first episode of the last season of INSECURE and god dam was it relatable. the late twenties/early thirties existentialism, maturity and wisdom but also still figuring shit up, was sooo relatable. something about the episode being placed in a college ten year reunion felt soooo fitting somehow. the theme of growth and simultaneous nostalgia. issa rae is such a gift to this world. the nostalgia in this episode oh my god. the laughter with friends, the narration that these friendships don’t come by all that often. after a weekend like mine these words really hit home. kelly’s narration towards the end of the episode on the radio show - my god. “how do you want to spend your time, be remembered, when you know something is coming to an end?” everyone that episode looked their best, so hot but mature and put together, more at ease with themselves, still themselves but loving themselves a bit more. compared to how crusty some of them looked in season one, seeing them thriving in their reunion really made me happy.

after that it posted some pics online and watched the season finale of euphoria with my roommates. although this season was so over the top, i was inspired by when cassie was telling her sister off that she never lived life, only watched it. and that’s why she could judge everyone. i actually would agree with that. i felt like i had been both of them before, more often lexie. watching and observing, learning, but not from experience. it inspired me to live more, just like i had been doing this weekend.

[pocketminstrel]

erratic as fuck

i feel like a headless chicken tonight, there’s a brooding anxiety ready to burst so i’m writing this to keep it at bay

i feel very lost and lonely, even though i had a full weekend with friends and family who i know deeply care about me - saw my brother today, grace, josh, and many of my sister’s friends (whom i somewhat grew up with) yesterday

friends leaving me on read right now is making me feel extra lonely and disconnected from reality, especially as my body sits here in orange county, miles away from my belongings and rituals in new york 

i say belongings intentionally, rather than “home” because i don’t know what the fuck home is to me anymore. for a long time my home i believe that my home was anchored in a person. this person provided me a sense of stability amid the occasional listlessness and lack of belonging

belongings... belonging

lately i’ve been feeling extremely pessimistic about romantic love. i know that’s irrational to say - as i’m 2.5 months out of a breakup that lasted 4.5 years - but i’m beginning to realize how different everyone is - the way they play, the way they debate or muse and wonder, the way they see the world, how they value community. what their values are. 

sometimes i wish i wasn’t so particular about the people i like - like wouldn’t it be nice if i could look past an awful taste in fashion hah

it’s a miracle that people are able to actually find people they are confident enough to marry and and have children with. i had a moment with some of my coworkers who are both dads - thinking - woah, what a fucking success and a miracle you both experienced.

i believe the more self actualized you are, the more nodes there are to connect in another person. that makes finding a partner so much harder. I’m feeling like i have a lot of nodes. maybe too many? 

will i end up a japanese loser dog? (damn you jingnan for putting this framework in my head)

[pocketminstrel]

good habits I’m striving towards

- Sunscreen on face and neck every morning

- Floss every night

- Mouth rinse every night

- 5000 steps (at least) every day

- Pilates 3-5 times a week

- Melatonin same time every night

[pocketminstrel]

ugh

when i had my therapy session with lainie a couple tuesdays ago, it felt like a spell had been broken. I spent the whole session talking about the intricacies of my sleep to someone who didn’t seem confused or overwhelmed and listened with curiosity, empathy, and most importantly, hope. It was the hope that gave me so much deep comfort - I finally had someone who now understood all that I’d been through, didn’t think I was crazy, didn’t look so concerned, and whose one job in my life was going to help me along this journey to normalcy.

It really really felt like something had changed within me. It felt spiritual. Things had clicked somehow. And I had a week of perfect sleep.

But all of that progress got pulled out from under me after I talked to my therapist again last tuesday. I expressed my joy of having a week of perfect sleep, and some fears that I had that this wouldn’t last or that this was another deceiving “good week” amid the bad ones (half knowing that this time though, something was different). Lainie responded in a very odd way by asking me what it would take to accept that bad kiwi would be a part of my life, and I... though partially fearful, entertained what she was saying ... 

She spent some time trying to get me to wrap my head around the expectation that I won’t have perfect sleep every day for the rest of my life. What it would take to accept this as something that will come up sometimes. 

But bad sleep is not chronic insomnia. I fucking know it’s not realistic to get a good night’s kiwi every night. That’s never been my goals for all of this. I’m just trying to get back to where I was before summer of 2020, before I had 9 months of debilitating insomnia. For the first 24 years of my fucking life. It was as if she was trying to get me to accept that this condition would be a part of me forever, conflating bad kiwi for night after night after night after night of being awake.

I don’t want this condition to be my forever - in fact, that’s something that I wholeheartedly reject. I don’t want this to be forever, and I don’t believe it will last forever. It felt as if she no longer had faith that I’d get out of this spell soon, and needed me to welcome it into my life forever. It was extremely devastating. And that something that had changed within me changed back to the amorphous jumble of fear and anxiety that it was before. And that jumble is what I believe to be pumping adrenaline into me every night, and keeping me from healing.

_

She made me speak about my kiwi as if were some terminal illness or uncurable condition I’d have to welcome for the rest of my life in some way. But in journaling now, I want to whole heartedly reject that. Because for me, there was 25 years of reasonably normal sleep; some things happened to me that snowballed into getting no kiwi at all, and now I’m in this debilitating state, but at the depths of my heart, I have always believed this to be an odd experience but temporary. How long it’ll last I’m not sure. I’m just riding it out and trying a few things to help. I don’t want to accept that this is forever because it’s been extremely debilitating. Proposing that is almost like a slap in the face because of how much pain and suffering it brings. How do I welcome something into my life that’s healable and that’s killing me every single fucking day to the point that I look at myself and see me aging. This illness is more of a parasite than a terminal disease. Sometimes it gets so hard that I often think that it’s easier if I wasn’t alive. I’m not suicidal by any means, but my mind drifts to death as the only solution to this suffering.

[pocketminstrel]

asian adolescence

the nicks - distanced himself from other asians as a strategy to climb the social ladder. bullied asian people in public and couldn't look them in the eye in private. regularly put on a chinese accent (despite being korean) to make his white friends more comfortable (his way of addressing the elephant in the room.)

the christinas - whose vietnamese mother hit her across the face in 9th grade, and a white girl in journalism class reported it to the school. my asian friends and i debated at length whether or not this was the right thing to do. our white friends convinced us that it was. christina ended up moving schools.

the sues - one of a few asian people in her elementary school, where she had a close group of all white friends for all of k-6. i met her the summer before 7th grade, and she transitioned out of that group after a few conversions she had with me on AIM.

the ins - one of a handful of people who didn't join my high school via the feeder middle school across the street. he and his crew of white friends were a tight knit pack. we figured he didn't have one ounce of korean in him, but after starting school at ucla, all of his friends in facebook photos were asian.

the connies - experimented with alcohol, dating, and partying earlier than the rest of us. was asked to go to prom with one of the guys in in's friend group in senior year. through the grapevine, heard that he was planning to have sex with her on prom night. she confronted him in rage, and he denied having said anything.

[pocketminstrel]

jay kang and steven yeung

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/magazine/steven-yeun.html

“When I was in school, I was playing within a persona,” Yeun said. “I’m going to be quieter, nicer, friendlier. But when I’m at church, I’m going to be me. When I’m at home, I’m going to be me. And sometimes I think I was putting up such a mask and a wall when I was at school that I had no patience for anything when I was at home.” He let his emotions “build up into this constant anger.”

Those were the divisions in his life: quiet and unassuming Steven at school; confident Steven at church, playing in the band and holding his own on the sports fields. And for most of his childhood and his young adulthood, Yeun didn’t overthink these divisions. He existed in both spaces at once.

He said he had also felt this self-doubt during his career — the feeling of helplessness that comes with realizing that nobody who looks like you has done the things you want to do. “It’s painful to feel that aware,” he said. But he also said he thought there were ways in which that hypersensitivity could become its own prison. “You can lock yourself into those patterns, and then all of a sudden you can’t even see outside of it,” he said. “You don’t see how you might be able to break through the system.” Then he added: “If I see a door is cracked open, I just want to see what’s behind that thing. And I just go through it. And I get burned a lot, too, but whatever.”

“Minari” premiered at Sundance and took home the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and an audience award. Yeun’s father sat next to him during the screening, which unnerved Yeun. “There’s such a rift between generations because of the communication barrier, and because of a cultural barrier,” he said. But with this film, what he and the director were trying to tell their parents was: “I’m a father. And now I understand what you had to go through.”

Yeun began to tear up as he told this to me. “Every time I talk about it, I’m just, like, crying about it, you know? Because I think my dad felt seen.” And, Yeun added, his father “was able to communicate that back to me through a look.” They started to close the gap. “That took 36 years to bridge.”

This was how my parents experienced so many aspects of American life. They mostly couldn’t pick up on what their children might call “microaggressions” or any of the veiled comments and exclusions. They generally kept the faith — rightfully, I believe — that a majority of the people who asked questions about where they were from, or what they ate, or told them about a great Korean-barbecue restaurant they had visited, were acting out of curiosity, even kindness. This, of course, did not mean our lives were free from prejudice, but rather that part of the immigrant optimism about the new country comes out of a deep unfamiliarity with the subtle ways people let it be known that the immigrants’ dreams aren’t particularly welcome. We children are aware of all this, of course, because we are American.

[pocketminstrel]

Securing a people's"homeland"or national territory has long been important to nationalist aspirations (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Calhoun 1993). After its successful anticolonial struggle against England and its formation as a nation-state, the United States pursued a sustained imperialist policy in order to acquire much of the land that defines its current borders. This history of conquest illustrates the significance of property in relations of space, place, and territory. Moreover, just as households and neighborhoods are seen as needing protection from outsiders, maintaining the integrity of national borders has long formed a pillar of U.S. foreign policy. Because the United States has operated as a dominant world power since World War II, shielding its own home soil from warfare has been a minor theme. Instead, protecting so-called American interests has been more prominent.

Patricia Hill Colllins, It’s all in the family

[pocketminstrel]

The Internet has a history, geography, and demography grounded firmly in the material realities of gender, class, and race, and these shape the technology and influence our experience of the technology. The collection of digital technologies that we now refer to as the Internet began as an initiative of the United States Department of Defense, called ARPAnet (Advanced Re- search Projects Agency Network). The architects and early adopters of Internet technologies have predominantly been white men. While the accomplishments of African Americans and women across racial and ethnic categories have often been neglected, these exceptional individuals are frequently tokens in an otherwise white-male domain of computer technology. This white-male dominance of computer technology continues. Today the leaders of both the software and Internet-related industries and the cultural commentators who write most often for mass media outlets about digital cultures are predominantly men and exclusively white.

Daniels, Gender, White Supremacy, and the Internet

[pocketminstrel]

Through his formulation of “double consciousness,” Du Bois (1903) sets the stage for an argument that Blackness should be understood as a conflicted identity shaped by the need to participate in parallel yet discontinuous discourses. For Du Bois, personal (not individual) Black identity is the intersection between Black communal solidarity and a national white supremacist ideology. His formulation acknowledges the hegemony of whiteness without privileging it over the agency and spiritual energy found within the Black community. It is worth repeating: double consciousness, as a formulation of identity, has to do with differences in the experience of being an individual in the two communities and not with the marginalized social roles within a single community (Rawls, 2000). This approach highlights the protean nature of Black identity mediated through different digital artifacts, services, and practices. The digital provides an indexical location where experiences and perceptions, promoted through the acts of individuals, occur (see Alcoff, 2000). From this position, Pacey’s (1984) triadic formulation for technology can be repurposed to illustrate Alcoff’s contention—that is, Black identity as an “artifact” with “practices” (here argued for as Twitter practice and signifyin’) and “beliefs” (double consciousness). [...] Signifyin’ as Black Discursive Identity To understand racial identity as constructed through discourse, this analysis is grounded in research on the Black discursive practice of “signifyin’,” which is argued here as a marker of Black cultural identity (Gates, 1983; Smitherman, 1977; Mitchell-Kernan, [1972] 1999). Signifyin’ draws on Ferdinand de Saussure’s ([1916] 1974, p. 67) sign/signifier/signified but purposefully reformulates that definition. Beginning with the contention that “the culture of a nation exerts an influence on its language, and the language . . . is largely responsible for the nation” (p. 20), this analysis relies on de Saussure’s argument that the relationship between sign and sign-concept and sign-signifier is at once arbitrary and fixed by the cultural milieu in which the sign exists. Signifyin’ practice draws attention to the signifier. In addition to uttering the “sound-object,” speech practice publicizes the signifier as a playfully multivalent interlocutor to a community of speakers. In doing so, the signified, or “concept,” is freed from its role in creating a fixed meaning, generating possibilities (inventio) for chains of signifiers. Signifyin’ can thus be understood as a practice where the interlocutor inventively redefines an object using Black cultural commonplaces and philosophy. For example, Gates defines signifyin’ as “a rhetorical practice unengaged in information giving. Signifying turns on the play and chain of signifiers . . . the ‘signifier as such’ in Julia Kristeva’s phrase, [is] a ‘presence that precedes the signification of object or emotion’” (1983, pp. 688–689). Call and response refers to the speaker’s reference to, inclusion of, and responses from the audience in discourse as opposed to a monologic, lecturing style of address. Smitherman and Gates each carefully point out that limiting signifyin’ to insult or misdirection is reductive; it is the articulation of a shared worldview, where recognition of the forms plus participation in the wordplay signals membership in the Black community. From this perspective, Black discourse moves from a bland information transfer to a communal commentary on political and personal realities. [...] Twitter and TXTmob share feature DNA in part because engineers from Odeo were involved in TXTmob’s development. Evan Henshaw-Plath was one such engineer; he helped Hirsch improve the code and even presented TXTmob to the Odeo staff a few days before Dorsey’s infamous design brainstorming session that resulted in Twitter (Hirsch, 2013, p. 2). Hirsch carefully notes that Twitter made a number of innovations and improvements to the concept of text-based messaging that TXTmob had never considered. Comparing Twitter to TXTmob here helps clarify something about Twitter that capitalists, investors, and the media still find confusing: Who is Twitter for? Retelling the story of TXTmob’s encoding activist practice sheds light on why Twitter became a valuable organizing tool for Occupy, for the Arab Spring, and for Black Twitter. It also highlights SMS as an embodied information technology—the mobile phones we use for these services are made to be in our hands, always in close proximity to our bodies. This relationship among embodiment, information, and utterance presages my arguments for libidinal information technology use as an expression of self and culture.

Distributed Blackness

[pocketminstrel]

Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

[pocketminstrel]

white socio-spatial epistemology

“ White socio-spatial epistemology The vulgar racism commonly ascribed to the white working class in the USA is perhaps the primary means of distancing and differentiating employed by them in the absence of class privileges that allow for the more subtle creation of  White socio-spatial epistemology actual physical distance manifested in the neighbourhoods and schools of genteel suburbia.”

“White socio-spatial epistemology The preoccupation with space ... often reflects the modern concept of territoriality and the positioning of dominant groups, instead of recognizing that such outcomes are deeply implicated in the rationale of a spatial organization of society based on Enlightenment notions of imperial civilization. Part of the agenda for the new millennium, therefore, must be the pressing need to make considerations of racialization a fundamental aspect of geographical under- standing, in much the same way that more and more geographers have recognized that no human geography is complete without a consideration of gender.”

“White socio-spatial epistemology It follows that geographers attempting to overturn whiteness might well begin with an analysis of the forms of knowledge underwriting social practices and social spaces. Inasmuch as geography has contributed to those forms of thought, the discipline is complicit in these practices and spaces. A politics working in opposition to this epistemology of self- assertion and segmentation would thus pose challenging questions to the white centre: ‘Who has the power to organize alterity into difference, and difference into identities?’ ‘How does this process vary historically and geographically?’ ‘Who is socially and spatially excluded in this process, and with what effects?’ ‘And, how can the security of white identities and spaces be deconstructed, destabilized and undermined?’ Clearly these are only parts of an anti-racist political agenda, one that needs to operate on many levels. But by drawing attention to epistemology, we hope to connect theory and practice in ways that work on both the discipline and white society more generally.”

Dwyer Jones

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[o]ne can measure very neatly the white American’s distance from his conscience—from himself—by ob- serving the distance between white America and black America. One has only to ask oneself who established this distance, who is this distance designed to protect, and from what is this distance designed to offer protection? (1998 [1965]: 725)

James Baldwin

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For Gordon, this problematic of a denied subjectivity is a structured vio- lence where “all is permitted” and where this structured violence is produc- tive of and produced by a certain white normativity, meaning that white- ness is made normative and, in so being, raceless, or what Goldberg terms “racially invisible.”68 What Gordon insightfully calls the “notion of white prototypicality” is the enabling condition of the structured violence of “the dialectics of recognition.”69 This prototypical whiteness is one facet of the cultural and technological logic that informs many instances of the prac- tices of biometrics and the visual economy of recognition and verification that accompanies these practices. Digital epidermalization is the exercise of power cast by the disembodied gaze of certain surveillance technologies (for example, identity card readers and e-passport verification machines) that can be employed to do the work of alienating the subject by producing a truth about the racial body and one’s identity (or identities) despite the subject’s claims.

Dark Matters

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Information machines are the sole means of vision in digital visual cul- ture, but as the body itself becomes socially defined and handled as infor- mation, there is even more at stake in paying attention to the incursions of machines in everyday life and the forms of resistance available to us.

Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet

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Thus the barracoon, or slave barracks, was a slave factory where the surgeon’s classificatory, quantifying, and authorizing gaze sought to single out and render disposable those deemed unsuitable, while imposing a certain visibility by way of the brand on the enslaved. That Barbot chose to name the spatial logic of capture as a purpose-built prison gestures toward the bureaucratic regulation of branding as part of the much larger carceral and traumatic practices of transatlantic slavery. Epidermalization, Stuart Hall writes, is “literally the inscription of race on the skin.”23 It is the disassociation between the black “body and the world” that sees this body denied its specificity, dissected, fixed, imprisoned by the white gaze, “deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, ra- cial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania.”24 “Y’a bon” is the slogan for Banania, a banana flour–based chocolate drink first sold commercially in France in the early 1900s and popularized with a caricature of a smiling, red fez–wearing Senegalese sol- dier with his rifle at his feet gracing the drink’s packaging. Such commod- ity packaging is invested with the scientific racism, like that expressed by both Long and Barbot, which depicted Africans as servile, primitive, and ranked as an inferior species. In simple terms, biometrics is a technology of measuring the living body. The application of this technology is in the verification, identification, and automation practices that enable the body to function as evidence.  The notion of a body made out of place, or made ontologically insecure, is useful when thinking through the moments of contact enacted at the institutional sites of international border crossings and spaces of the internal borders of the state, such as the voting booth, the welfare office, the prison, and other sites and moments where identification, and increasingly biometric informa- tion, is required to speak the truth of and for muted bodies. These sites and moments are productive of, and often necessitate, ontological insecurity, where “all around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.” Fanon’s insight, shared by DuBois, is that there is no inner subjectiv- ity, where there is no being, where there is no one there, and where there is no link to another subjectivity as ward, as guardian, or owner, then all is permitted. Since in fact there is an Other human being in the denied relationship, evidenced by, say, antiblack racism, what this means is that there is a subjectivity that is experiencing a world in which all is permitted against him or her.

Dark Matters

[pocketminstrel]

I want to make a link here between Mann’s naming of the human eye as a “body- borne camera” and what Judith Butler terms the “racially saturated field of visibility” and what Maurice O. Wallace has called the “picturetaking racial gaze” that fixes and frames the black subject within a “rigid and limited grid of representational possibilities.”59 In other words, these are ways of seeing and conceptualizing blackness through stereotypes, abnormalization, and other means that impose limitations, particularly so in spaces that are shaped for whiteness, as discussed above with reference to Fanon’s epidermalization and to Fiske on how some acts and even the mere presence of blackness gets coded as criminal. We can read a rigid framing in how Rodney King’s acts of self- defense during a traffic stop in Los Angeles as recorded by Holliday on March 3, 1991, were coded as aggressive and violent. When King raised his hand to protect himself from police baton blows, his actions were met with more police force. Within what Butler has called a “racially saturated field of visibility,” such police violence is not read as violence; rather, the racially saturated field of visibility fixed and framed Rodney King and read his actions, as recorded by Holliday, as that danger from which whiteness must be protected.

Dark Matters